What is Wikileaks?

Wikileaks made news again this week, after some 90,000 Afghanistan war documents showed up online. But how much do we really know about the site?

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There's a blurb at the top of the current Wikileaks homepage stating that the site, "could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act." This isn't just a piece of hyperbolic self-aggrandizement. It's a quote from a January Time Magazine article titled, "A Wiki for Whistle-Blowers."

The piece begins, "By March, more than one million leaked documents from governments and corporations in Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Bloc will be available online in a bold new collective experiment in whistle-blowing."

That was merely the tip of the iceberg. In March of this year, Wikileaks ran a 32-page Counterintelligence Analysis Report detailing the U.S. Department of Defense's concern over the site. The report stated, among other things, that Wikileaks posed threats to the military's "operational security and information security."

Less than a month later, the site released footage of a 2007 U.S. military incident that resulted in the death of 12, including two Reuters employees. The video, titled "Collateral Murder," along with a number of simultaneously released classified documents resulted in the arrest of a 22-year-old army intelligence officer named Bradley Manning, who reportedly confessed to the information leaks in an online conversation with a hacker.

The site made headlines again over the weekend, when it posted more than 90,000 largely classified documents pertaining to the war in Afghanistan, some of which revealed U.S. military suspicions of the Pakistani government's alignment with Al Qaeda. The site was knocked offline for part of Monday, but Wikileaks also handed the documents over to the New York Times, The Guardian, and Germany's Der Spiegel. The Times said of the leak, "Most of the reports are routine, even mundane, but many add insights, texture and context to a war that has been waged for nearly nine years."

Later that day, the White House national security advisor James Jones called Wikileaks "irresponsible," stating, that "the United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security."

So, who or what precisely is behind this threat? Well, for someone who is supposedly shrouded in mystery, Assange has largely become the public face for the site. He has appeared everywhere from "The Colbert Report" to Al Jazeera, promoting the site's mission statement "that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government, and stronger democracies."

In the wake of the massive Afghanistan news leak, Assange held a press conference in London. "This material does not leave anyone smelling like roses," he asserted at the event, going so far as to suggest that there was evidence of war crimes within the leaked documents.

Before joining Wikileaks, Assange had a long history of hacking, dating back to the late 80s. That same decade, he and two like-minded cohorts launched a group called the International Subversives, hacking into a number of systems in Europe and North America, including the U.S. Department of Defense and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to The New Yorker.

In 1991, Australian police raided his home. "A couple of days later, police turned up, and they carted off all my computer stuff," he later told the magainze. "[The raid] involved some dodgy character who was alleging that we had stolen five hundred thousand dollars from Citibank." The police didn't charge Assange and eventually gave his equipment back. In 1997, he played a large role in the creation of Suelette Dreyfus's book "Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier."

Despite the public persona, Assange insisted that he didn't found the site. The site started in 2006, but its founders have remained anonymous. A 2007 article in Australia's The Ageclaims that a group of "Chinese dissidents, with the help of powerful encryption software," are responsible for getting Wikileaks off the ground.

An older version of Wikileaks' About page explains it thusly: "Wikileaks was founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa." In its current incarnation, however, the page simple states that it was founded by "The Sunshine Press." Assange joined Wikileaks fairly early on, serving as a spokesman at least since early 2007. Assange has described his position with the company in a number of ways, calling himself a member of its advisers board and, more recently, Wikileaks' editor-in-chief.

The site's first post appeared in December of 2006. The New Yorker described it as a "'secret decision,' signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China. The document called for the execution of government officials by hiring 'criminals' as hit men."

Over the past few years, the company has leaked a number of high-profile documents. In late 2007, "Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta," a U.S. Army document highlighting Guantanamo Bay procedure appeared. In September 2008, the site housed the contents of Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo account. In November 2009, thousands of documents from the Climatic Research Unit were leaked to the site. The resulting controversy, nicknamed "Climategate," reignited the climate change debate.

Wikileaks is, fittingly, a global operation encompassing a small handful of full-time employees and a large army of part-time volunteersupwards of 800 people, according to some online numbers. The site is hosted by PRQ in Sweden, a company that offers "bulletproof hosting." The hosting is extremely secure, and the company goes out of its way not to ask questions about the content its hosts. PRQ also hosts legally questionable sites like The Pirate Bay.

Wikileaks has already been banned in Chinanot especially surprising, given that the site's founders refer to themselves as "Chinese dissidents." As for its legality in the U.S., the recent Afghanistan leaks have certainly provided more than enough cause for the government to take an even closer look at the site, which is keeping nearly everyone in Washington on their toes.

U.S. attorney general Eric Holder told the press this week that the Department of Defense and the Justice Department are probing the source of the leaks.

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"The Justice Department is working with the Department of Defense with regard to an investigation concerning who the source of those leaks might be," Holder said during a press conference reported by Bloomberg. "Whether there will be any criminal charges brought depends on how the investigation goes."

"I deplore the release of classified information," he continued. "It's not in the interest of the United States to have that kind of information leaked."

The day before, President Obama said he is, "concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations."

Brian Heater came to PCMag in 2006, after working at Laptop Magazine as a staff writer. His writing has appeared in Spin, The Onion, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Press, The Oklahoma Gazette, The Metro Santa Cruz, Heeb, and a lot of music magazines you’ve probably never heard of. He also runs the comics site The Daily Cross Hatch, which he strongly recommends you check out. One time Brian met the president. He had green hair back then. Long story.
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